The Colonel was a Private.

Who doesn’t like fried chicken? And what is the best fried chicken? Well, there are many that think Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is the best. I tend to agree. I love Kentucky Fried Chicken!

And when we think of KFC we generally think of Colonel Sanders and well, he must be from Kentucky right? Wrong.

Harlan David Sanders was born on September 9, 1890, in Henryville, Indiana, a small farming community in Southeast Southern Indiana. Sanders would have been 135 years old today.

Sanders had a tough life. His father passed away when he was six and his mother worked several jobs to make ends meet. Sanders was the oldest of three children. So, when his mother was working, he oversaw looking after his younger siblings and taking care of the home, which included cooking. At age seven, Sanders was skilled at cooking bread, vegetables and meat. He mastered several regional dishes before his tenth birthday.

The family needed money, so Sanders entered the workforce as a farmhand at 13. He made $2 a month (about $55 today). By the time he was 15, he was working on a streetcar, taking fares and making change.

When Sanders turned 16, he forged documents to join the U.S. Army. However, he only served three months as a private wagoner (driver of a horse-drawn wagon), but that was the service commitment. He received the Cuban Pacification Medal and an honorable discharge.

During the next two decades, Sanders worked multiple jobs: railroad worker, insurance salesman, steamboat ferry operator, tire salesman, and secretary to the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus, Indiana. He wasn’t very good at that job, so he resigned. For six years, he operated a gas station before the Depression hit, and the station folded.

In 1930, at the age of 40, Sanders was out of money. He was broke. He made his way to Corbin, Kentucky, where the Shell Oil Company agreed to allow him and his family to live at a gas station. In exchange, a large percentage of the sales went to the company.

In his autobiography, Sanders said, “Corbin was the only place I knew I could start again without any money, a place where business would be driving by my door 24 hours a day.”

Sanders was right. Motorists passed through his station day and night, usually hungry. They would ask Sanders for recommendations, and soon Sanders realized he should be the one feeding the hungry travelers.

Sanders’ first diners ate at his dining room table with his family. Word of his culinary skills spread like butter on a biscuit, and people came for his steak, country ham, eggs, biscuits, and of course, his fried chicken.

The gas station/café did so well, Sanders bought out the motel across the street and turned it into a 142-seat restaurant.

Orders, especially for chicken, piled up. Sanders needed a way to cook faster. That’s when he discovered, as he put it, “a new-fangled thing called a pressure cooker” at a local hardware store. He adapted it to fry a lot of chicken quickly.

“Sanders Court and Café” became one of the most popular stops in Kentucky. For his fried chicken achievements and community service, in 1935, Ruby Laffoon, the governor of Kentucky bestowed upon Sanders the title of colonel “in recognition of his contributions to the state’s cuisine” The title stuck. People called him “Colonel Sanders” from that point on. That was how Harlan Sanders became “Colonel Sanders.”

However, Sanders faced another setback in the early 1950s when the route of the new interstate 70 was announced. The new highway did not go by Sanders’ place, and his business took a hit.

That is when Sanders decided his future wasn’t tied to one restaurant, but many of them, selling his chicken. So, at age 62, he sold his restaurant and motor court, barely making enough money to pay off his bills and taxes, and hit the road with his recipe and his pressure cooker.

Sanders drove from town to town, diner to diner, pleading with owners to use his delicious chicken recipe and give him a nickel commission on each piece sold.

He slept in his car and was nearly broke again.

Sanders was rejected 1009 times. The 1010th was the charm: Pete Harmon, owner of the Do Drop Inn in Salt Lake City, Utah, accepted Sanders’ offer.

It was the beginning of the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Seven years later, Sanders had made more than 200 more deals in the U.S. and Canada.

That’s also when Sanders started dressing the part. From the late 1950s until his death in 1980, Sanders wore a white suit to hide flour stains, a string tie, and dyed his mustache and goatee white to match his white hair.

Sanders sold the company to a food conglomerate in 1964 for $2 million (about $15 million today) but stayed on a as a spokesman and the face of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sanders was now 73 years old.

However, Sanders hated what the conglomerate turned his food into. He called it “slop” and the owners “a bunch of boozehounds,” so he developed plans to franchise “The Colonel’s Lady’s Dinner House” restaurant, which he opened with his wife Claudia in Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1968 as a competitor.

When executives threatened to block the plan, Sanders sued for $122 million. The two sides settled out of court, with Sanders receiving $1 million and an understanding that he would give a cooking lesson to the executives. In return, he would stop criticizing Kentucky Fried Chicken’s food.

The renamed “Claudia Sanders Dinner House” was allowed to remain open and is still in operation today.

Sanders traveled the world as a salaried good will ambassador, plus other benefits: Sanders made multi-billionaire status by age 88, talking chicken until he died.

In June of 1980, Sanders was diagnosed with acute Leukemia. He died six months later of pneumonia in Louisville, Kentucky, on December 16, 1980. He was 90 years old.

His wife Claudia died on December 31, 1996, at the age of 94.

Harlan Sanders once said, “One has to remember that every failure can be a steppingstone to something better.”